


A Girl Ought to Have a Sense of Humor

by theshipsfirstmate



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, post-4x13
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-20 04:01:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5991064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theshipsfirstmate/pseuds/theshipsfirstmate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>post-4x13, Felicity reflects on a certain defense mechanism.</p><p>“You don’t have to be funny for me,” Oliver told her. “You know that, right?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Girl Ought to Have a Sense of Humor

 

_Title from “[Funny Girl](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DTK97zF7hZRs&t=MmUzMGI0ODA2MWY1ZTdjZmM0OGRiNTBhMmI5Mzk4MTgxZGQxYzhmYyxkMXowckVVTw%3D%3D)” from Funny Girl (Babs is honestly the only version that matters, c’mon.)_

**A Girl Ought to Have a Sense of Humor**

_“You don’t have to be funny for me,” Oliver told her. “You know that, right?”_

She does. She knows that. For some reason, he’s always liked her best at her most sincere.

That doesn’t mean his words don’t keep her up that night. As Oliver snores softly in her ear, Felicity turns memories over in her mind, realizing just how well her fiance knows her, how much he had revealed in one seemingly simple reassurance.

She was seven years old when her father walked out on them, and her mother cried for almost two weeks straight. Try as she might, Felicity couldn’t seem to stop Donna’s tears from flowing, but she found out she could pause them momentarily with a well-timed joke.

They were silly little bits – impressions from her mother’s favorite movies, a current events reference she gleaned from the Today show while making her own breakfast, a dirty joke from some late night stand-up – but they did the trick.

“God, you’re a funny girl,” Donna would tell her, using a tissue to blot off the rest of her streaky mascara, and then she’d rewind the VHS and spend two hours mooning over Omar Sharif and missing the point entirely.

* * *

In fifth grade, after three years of squinting at the blackboard, she finally got glasses, and for a few months, everything was perfect in Felicity’s world. No more headaches, no copying off a sloppy classmate when the writing was too small to read, no worrying about getting a seat in the back the next time the teacher decided to arbitrarily rearrange the classroom.

Then one night, she fell asleep reading The Phantom Tollbooth for maybe the thousandth time and woke up with her glasses twisted and tangled in her sheets, the cheap, thin metal frames snapped like a toothpick. She remembers expecting to be scolded, but somehow it was even worse when her mother’s eyes just dropped in what she knows now was embarrassment and remorse.

“I can’t afford new ones,” Donna had said softly. “You’re gonna have to tape them.” There was no use arguing, Felicity knew just as well as Donna did that they didn’t have it. She was already balancing the checkbook.

No one teased much when she got glasses, but broken glasses were a different story entirely, especially to a particularly vicious group of rich girls who got fresh material when Harry Potter started to pick up. Even though Felicity was meticulous, using the smallest amount of clear tape, there were apparently a lot of taunt to be harvested from a pair of broken spectacles.

None of the jokes were all that good, but Felicity already knew that was because she was smarter than pretty much everyone in her class, maybe the whole grade. So she squared her shoulders back and feigned imperviousness, ignoring the jabs until one day, a girl named Mandy – who once said Felicity’s mother was a “waitress” in a way that made it sound like a slur – saw the bridge of her glasses shake a little loose and simply snorted, “just get new ones already, Jesus Christ.”

She remembers how her cheeks burned on the way back to her desk, how she dropped her chin to her chest, trying to hide the hurt by pulling her glasses off and pretending to examine the nose pads. Suddenly, an arm shot across her desk from the left side, depositing one, two, three pieces of scotch tape on the edge of the wooden surface. Cheeks growing even hotter, she furrowed her brow and turned to her neighbor, a new kid name Frankie Valdes, only to see him pulling off his perfectly-intact Buddy Holly glasses and wrapping his own piece of tape on the bridge.

She must have looked like a deer in headlights, but Frankie – who had probably spoken seven words out loud since moving to their school a month earlier – just nodded at her, then at the tape, stashing the dispenser back in his desk after wrapping two more pieces of the tape around the earpieces, and holding them up to her with a smile. She remembers noticing that his eyes were very green.

Determined to one-up him, she stuck the other two pieces of tape over her lenses, and used a pencil to sketch out eyes on them before putting the frames back on. Frankie laughed so hard they both got yelled at, and after that he was her best friend for almost a year, until the public school system decided that the easiest way to deal with an advanced student like Felicity Smoak would be to send her to high school at age 11.

* * *

In AP Calc BC, Felicity really learned the ropes, overcompensating for being three years younger _and_ the only girl in class by workshopping several differents tactics before settling on a sarcastic stream-of-consciousness.

First, she tried silence. But it didn’t take long to learn that if she wanted to answer questions in the class – and she did, desperately, because half of those dudes didn’t know what the hell they were talking about – she had to say more out loud than just correct answers. A dozen 17-year-old boys thinking she was a know-it-all was not an ideal situation.

So, she made them laugh. It was the same dumb bits she used to do for her mom, with slightly updated references and barely advanced intellect. She talked fast, laying it on thick enough that her report card mark for “does not distract from the class” slipped down to a check-plus for the first time in her life. She worried that if she slowed down, they would figure out she wasn’t really funny at all, just quick.

Some of her classmates that year genuinely seemed to like her, and the rest at least tolerated her presence. Only one made it weird – a shaggy-haired stand-up bass player named Scott – who made the mistake of being so nice to her that his cheerleader girlfriend (Kristen? Kirsten?) accosted her one day in the hallway, apparently irritated that her so-called “man” usually walked with Felicity to their neighboring 5th period classes after Calc. The girl didn’t want to fight her, just cornered her and yelled, making a scene so embarrassing Felicity wondered if a few bruises wouldn’t just be easier.

She remembers wanting to tell Kir/risten that she never asked her Scott to walk with her in the first place, but that wasn’t really what the whole thing was about, anyway. She remembers hating the fact that those walks were a highlight of her day, hating the fact that it seemed like the cheerleader knew it.

“Listen, if you have a problem with your boyfriend, that sounds like it involves two people,” Felicity fired the second she saw an escape route, “neither of whom are me.”

A few people laughed nervously behind her as she bolted down a nearby stairwell without a glance back, and after that, she started hanging back in Calc after the bell rang. It only took Scott a week to get the hint.

* * *

College was a slightly different story, because she was someone else. Because on her first flight into Logan – in the time it took for her to realize the plane wasn’t crashing into the ocean on the landing – she realized that this was a new life, a new beginning. Felicity Smoak, M.I.T. Class of 2009, could be a whole new person entirely.

It was also different because of Cooper.

He had liked her best when she showed off, laughing hysterically as she annihilated one virtual target after another, smashing through firewalls and cutting down amateur know-it-alls in online forums with equal feracity. It’s not until recently that she realized how mean she was back then, how selfish and cruel that existence was. Certainly not all of that can be blamed on a poor choice of boyfriend, but it wasn’t until she met Oliver that she realized how the man she chose to love before him mirrored the cold, _calculating_ presence that had been removed from her life for over a decade at that point.

And then, in another perfect parallel, Cooper disappeared too.

Her post-goth reincarnation came with an epiphany, the realization that no longer being the smartest one in the room at M.I.T. didn’t have to be a bad thing (it helped that sometimes she still was), that beyond the vicious sort of intellectual competition she had been engaging in was an opportunity to do some actual good. The new Felicity completed the group projects, visited office hours, graduated summa cum laude and had a head start on her master’s as well as three job offers in the year-and-a-half after that.

She also went to trivia nights with people from her cognitive science study group and a few ill-fated dates with her nanoelectronics T.A. She charmed professors, kept her hair out of her eyes and re-learned how to smile genuinely.

By the time her plane landed in Starling City, she was someone else again.

* * *

Even when she first joined the Hood’s team, Felicity relied on her sense of humor to help her hold her own amidst the grey concrete walls and stone-faced men. Oliver was the drive, Diggle was the muscle, and she was the brains, the nerd cracking wise behind the relative safety of a computer screen. It was a position she held in her day job as well, and while Moira Queen hadn’t ever appreciated her sense of humor, Felicity’s supervisor in the I.T. department thankfully had, a mercy that spared her on several instances of vigilante-related tardiness.

As for the innuendoes and unfortunate slips of the tongue, she’d have to admit that some of them were simply break the tension. Even a chronic babbler has a limit. It was a constant effort to keep her head above whatever dark waters Oliver was sunk down into, and not too long after she joined the team, she started trying to pull him up too. It didn’t always work, but it was always worth it when he smiled at her.

She made a crack about traffic cameras as he chased down the Dodger, which would have been fine, except for it was the first time in Felicity’s life that she was certain she was about to die. She whiffed on a joke about playing doctor when he started to melt down as Moira and Malcolm’s truths unraveled all around them. She asked him for a coconut on Lian Yu when she wanted him to tell her he missed her.

She almost choked on her tongue trying to laugh over the word “unthinkable.” She teased Oliver about sentence fragments when he finally asked her out, and assured him she’d had it worse when the whole thing got blown to hell. She brought up a Nanda Parbat divorce when that niggling detail was the only thing keeping her from utter and complete, riding-into-the-sunset bliss. She laughed off “a threat from a supervillain ever now and then,” and caught his reassuring glance from across the room.

She made her mother scoff tearfully when she admitted her fears about losing herself in him, and gave her own bittersweet laugh when Donna confirmed what she already knew.

The next time the two of them were standing on death’s doorstep, Felicity gave him a hell of a speech that was basically a proposal, and the moment Oliver corrected her – “It was a holiday party” – she knew she’d say yes whenever he asked. And she'd keep saying it for the rest of their lives. Because Oliver Queen, a man without any happy stories, interrupted a life-threatening moment to make _her_ laugh.

* * *

When she woke up in the hospital and realized what had happened, she was almost glad when he stayed away for a few days. It was hard to come up with something that would clear away the pain and guilt she could already see in his eyes.

Bali came to her on one of the worst days, when she didn’t want to do anything but stare at the ceiling until her toes started to wiggle again.

_“I’ve always wanted to come here,” Oliver had admitted as soon as they were checked into their bungalow on the water, pouring the complimentary champagne into flutes._

_“I’ll toast to any island that brings you good memories,” she told him, wrapping her arms around him from behind and pressing kisses to his shoulder. “Even if they don’t have email.”_

_“This could be our spot.” She felt the reply rumble in his chest as he set down the bottle and turned to pull her into his embrace. “Somewhere that’s just for us.”_

It’s become a thing with them, after bad days or bad nights, as they trail off to sleep tangled up in each other. “Remember Bali?” Every stop on their trip around the world has its own special memory, but that one’s something else entirely.

So when he finally showed up at the hospital, she asked about it right away, pressed him on Bali until a smile broke through his anguish, forcing the rest of his truth out. She wanted that to be the moment she knew it’s going to be okay, knowing they didn’t have any time for grief. Thankfully, he put the ring back on her finger in enough time to temper the rest of her doubts, and asked her again later, just for good measure.

* * *

These days, she is a lot of things for Oliver Queen. Teammate, fiancee, Geek Squad, voice of reason and vigilante navigation. She is brave for him, she is strong for him, she is quick and precise and ruthless and loyal and head over heels for him. But she doesn’t have to be funny for him.

When he said it, laid it out for her like that in the midst of yet another personal crisis, it was like a weight had been lifted, one Felicity hadn't even realized was hanging from her shoulders. It’s not the first time she’s heard the words, or at least the sentiment, but it’s the first time she’s believed it.

She still _will_ be funny, of course, especially for him. She’ll try, at least. But she won’t do it to keep him at arm’s length, she’ll do it to pull him closer. She won’t cock an eyebrow to get him to notice her, odds are he’ll already be looking. She won’t tell him a joke to make him like her, because he already likes her. He likes her and he loves her, in a way she thought no one ever would.

She’ll be funny for him, just because she likes it when he smiles.


End file.
